- "Love is Blind" — a Netflix reality dating show that challenges 30 men and women to fall in love without seeing people they are dating and ultimately get married in the span of four weeks — premiered on February 13.
- Within the first episode and week of knowing each other, one couple has already gotten engaged — Lauren Speed, a 34-year-old content creator, and Cameron Hamilton, a 28-year-old scientist.
- Falling in love without seeing your paramour seems daunting enough as it is, but doing so in a short amount of time left some viewers skeptical.
- Insider spoke with three relationship experts on whether or not it's truly possible to fall in love as quickly as some of the contestants on the show.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
"Love is Blind" — a Netflix reality dating show that challenges 30 men and women to fall in love without seeing people they are dating and ultimately get married in the span of four weeks — premiered February 13 and critics are already skeptical.
Within the first episode, after five days of knowing each other, one couple has already gotten engaged — Lauren Speed, a 34-year-old content creator, and Cameron Hamilton, a 28-year-old scientist.
"I feel like I'm in a dream right now," Speed said on the show. "I feel like I'm floating."
Insider spoke with three relationship experts about whether or not it's truly possible to fall in love in less than a week.
You can quickly fall in love with the idea of someone, but deep, meaningful love requires getting to know them as a person
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Trying to define what love is can be challenging, as it varies greatly from person to person.
But Susannah Hyland, a psychotherapist based in New York, told Insider that deep, meaningful love is about truly connecting with someone who is aligned with you.
"Finding someone [or someones] with whom you are spiritually, emotionally and physically aligned, and someone [or someones] who evoke warmth, tenderness, and humility in you," Hyland said.
Zoë Entin, another New York-based psychotherapist, says falling in love is a misnomer for people beginning to form a deeper emotional connection — as is the case for some of the couples on the show.
"I believe you need to really know someone to love them," Entin said. "If you don't fully know a person you can't really determine whether you love them for who they are or based on your limited understanding of them."
Throughout the course of the show's first episode, Speed and Hamilton have deep, lengthy conversations with each other where they are shown getting personal very quickly.
But according Entin, while people can feel a strong connection to someone quickly, that doesn't necessarily mean they can quickly fall in love.
"I think it's possible for people to fall in love with their idea of someone very quickly," Entin said. "However, there is no way to truly know someone in a short amount of time."
The romanticized idea of instant love can lead to relationship problems
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Tyler Caver, another New York psychotherapist, told Insider that the fantasy of love at first swipe, sight, or text can lead to relationship problems.
Nobody is exactly like how they seemed on the first few dates. But some people find it hard to accept that.
"The concern arises when people are repeatedly in failed relationships because they don't want to (or are unable to) let go of the internal fantasy," Caver said.
"People end up feeling depressed, lonely, and hopeless because they begin to believe that they are the reason for the repeated relationship fails."
Ultimately, love is complicated — which makes to difficult to definitively say whether or not people can fall in love in five days
Whether or not you can do so in a short amount of time is complicated, according to Hyland. But certain factors like comparability, compassion, and self-understanding can make it more likely to happen.
"[The] short answer is yes. Slightly longer answer is, likelihood is higher and correlative with one's own self-compassion, self-understanding, self-reckoning," Hyland said. "But who knows, love is a crazy thing."
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